'They were just hell-bent': Mayor battling Ottawa over 'really left' housing mandate

Edmonton Journal

3 days ago

In a very civil tone, the mayor of Windsor, Ont., is asking the fresh faces in the Mark Carney-led Liberal government to butt out of city planning. Mayor Drew Dilkens especially wants to see an end to Trudeau-era affordable housing mandates from Ottawa that don't serve his community.
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'They were just hell-bent on putting forward this really left-principled version of what housing should be,' Drew says of the conditions imposed on cities under the $4-billion housing accelerator fund launched in 2023 by then federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser.
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Unlike most other big cities in Canada, Windsor chose not to apply for the housing accelerator dollars — turning down the possibility of a $30-million cash infusion into the city's densification strategies.
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City council didn't dare to accept the funds and later renege on the feds' conditions, Drew says: 'We basically walked away from $30 million because we refused to succumb, or be co-opted into something we felt was bad for the community.'
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Then-Liberal MP for Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore, Irek Kusmierczyk (who lost the 2025 election by just four votes to Conservative MP Kathy Borrelli), implored Windsor's city council to reconsider, insisting the feds were only asking for 'gentle density.'
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It's not so gentle, Drew counters, if you find yourself living next door to a new four-plex and you bought your house based on the community's single-family residential character.
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'We did it in our way,' Drew explains in a recent conversation, 'because there's no one who knows their community better, no level of government that knows their community better,' than the local council. The 53-year-old lawyer-cum-mayor grew up in Windsor, and has served on the city's council for nearly two decades, 11 as mayor.
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And when you look at Canada's Constitution, Drew points out, these issues are 'under the bailiwick of the provincial government … who delegate it to the municipalities.'
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The city's locally generated housing strategies — intense densification along transit routes; blanket rezoning in new neighbourhoods to allow for greater density; repurposing several municipally owned properties for housing — were rejected by the fund's managers as 'not ambitious enough.'
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'Ambition' was their favourite word, Drew grumbles: 'We weren't ambitious enough and they wanted to work with municipalities who had greater ambition.'